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Commentary & Analysis

In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.

Yesterday at the White House Summit on Global Development, as President Obama outlined the programmatic successes of his administration’s global development policy (all genuine and worthy of acclaim), he didn’t even bother to mention the response to the global financial crisis that consumed his administration for much of its first year. Yet, when we consider just how perilous the economic conditions were for the United States and the world during that time, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the cause of global development was served at least as much by these efforts than by any single development initiative launched by an American president.

After more than a decade of operations, MCC has made the shift from innovative start-up to established donor agency. “MCC NEXT,” the agency’s new, much-anticipated strategic plan, takes a hard look at how the poverty and development landscape has evolved over the past decade and stakes out the position a more mature MCC should take in this new context.

President Obama has concluded what may be his last official trip to Africa. While it was relatively brief, with visits to just two countries, the messages delivered were loud and they were powerful. Ben Leo summarizes his key points.

Last week, Nigerian President Buhari and President Obama spoke at length in the Oval Office. Much of the discussion focused on defeating Boko Haram and rooting out corruption in Nigeria. Yet, President Obama’s Power Africa Initiative, which aims to help provide access to 60 million households and businesses across Africa, was also high on the agenda.

Last week, President Obama’s Global Development Council (GDC) released a second report calling for bold, as well as incremental, reforms to “make US development efforts more catalytic and innovative.” This is a high-powered group of outside thinkers and doers, and their recommendations are excellent.

In testimony last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy, CGD’s Ben Leo called upon Congress to modernize how the United States supports economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. The hearing was called to reflect on the progress since the August 2014 US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington and to address obstacles that continue to discourage greater private-sector engagement in the region.

Imagine you are an aid agency with a new mission, set at the highest level: end world poverty. Two come to mind. How are you to achieve such a noble but audacious goal?

The first thing you’d want to do is define the target: what is meant by ‘poverty’? Perhaps you’d suggest that it was living on a little more than a dollar a day, or watching your children dying from preventable illness. Perhaps it is some combination of limited absolute or relative consumption –living on less than $1.25 a day or in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution, as it might be. Or maybe you’d go further and suggest that poverty was multifaceted, and only a range of indicators (perhaps as many as 169) could really capture what it was to be satiated or deprived.